fpga-tamagotchi

I wasn't taught directly (and don't know what I'm doing still), but I've had a lot of fun learning about retro hardware design as a software engineer. I've made a few of my own reverse engineered designs, trying to synthesize how the real designers would have built the chip at the time, and ported others for the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer project. Here's an example of my implementation of the original Tamagotchi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737872 (https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi)

After being thrust headfirst into FPGA development thanks to the Analogue Pocket, my first from scratch creation was a gate level implementation of the original Tamagotchi toy. The core, running on both the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer platforms, lets users re-experience the very first Tamagotchi from 1996 with accurate emulation, but modern features. The core has savestates (which is much harder to do in hardware vs software emulation), high turbo speeds (1,800x was the max clock speed I've reached so far), and more. Learning more about hardware and FPGAs is something I've wanted to do for many years, and I highly recommend it for any programmer-brained person. It's a very slightly different way of thinking that has vast consequences on how you look at simple problems.

Not to draw attention to myself or anything, but if you're interested in learning to make cores for the Analogue Pocket or MiSTer (or similar) platforms, I highly recommend taking a look at the resources and wiki I'm slowly building - https://github.com/agg23/analogue-pocket-utils/ I started ~7 months ago with approximately no FPGA or hardware experience, have now ported ~6 cores from MiSTer to Pocket, and just released my first core of my own, the original Tamagotchi - https://github.com/agg23/fpga-tamagotchi/ If you want to join in, I and several other devs are very willing to help talk you through it. We primarily are on the FPGAming Discord server - https://discord.gg/Gmcmdhzs - which is probably the best place to get a hold of me as well.

After ~7 months of being thrust headfirst into FPGA development thanks to the Analogue Pocket, my first from scratch creation is now available. The core, running on both the Analogue Pocket and MiSTer platforms, lets users re-experience the very first Tamagotchi from 1996 with accurate emulation, but modern features. The core has savestates (which is much harder to do in hardware vs software emulation), high turbo speeds (1,800x was the max clock speed I've reached so far), and more. Learning more about hardware and FPGAs is something I've wanted to do for many years, and I highly recommend it for any programmer-brained person. It's a very slightly different way of thinking that has vast consequences on how you look at simple problems. Finally decided to create a real account instead of my throwaway and actually post something.